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arXiv:1611.03790 · Quantum Information and Computation

Weight reduction for quantum codes

Mathew B. Hastings

Published Dec 1, 2017• 30 citations
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Abstract

We present an algorithm that takes a CSS stabilizer code as input, and outputs another CSS stabilizer code such that the stabilizer generators all have weights O(1) and such that O(1) generators act on any given qubit. The number of logical qubits is unchanged by the procedure, while we give bounds on the increase in number of physical qubits and in the effect on distance and other code parameters, such as soundness (as a locally testable code) and “cosoundness” (defined later). Applications are discussed, including to codes from high-dimensional manifolds which have logarithmic weight stabilizers. Assuming a conjecture in geometry[11], this allows the construction of CSS stabilizer codes with generator weight O(1) and almost linear distance. Another application of the construction is to increasing the distance to X or Z errors, whichever is smaller, so that the two distances are equal.

DOI
10.26421/qic17.15-16-4

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We present an algorithm that takes a CSS stabilizer code as input, and outputs another CSS stabilizer code such that the stabilizer generators all have weights O(1) and such that O(1) generators act on any given qubit. The number of logical qubits is unchanged by the procedure, while we give bounds on the increase in number of physical qubits and in the effect on distance and other code parameters, such as soundness (as a locally testable code) and “cosoundness” (defined later). Applications are discussed, including to codes from high-dimensional manifolds which have logarithmic weight stabilizers. Assuming a conjecture in geometry[11], this allows the construction of CSS stabilizer codes with generator weight O(1) and almost linear distance. Another application of the construction is to increasing the distance to X or Z errors, whichever is smaller, so that the two distances are equal.
Quantum low-density parity-check (qLDPC) codes can be implemented by measuring only low-weight checks, making them compatible with noisy quantum hardware and central to the quest to build noise-resilient quantum computers. A fundamental open question is how constraints on check weight limit the achievable parameters of qLDPC codes. Here, we study stabilizer and subsystem codes with constrained check weight, combining analytical arguments with numerical optimization to establish strong upper bounds on their parameters. We show that stabilizer codes with checks of weight at most three cannot have nontrivial distance. We also prove tight tradeoffs between rate and distance for broad families of CSS stabilizer and subsystem codes with checks of weight at most four and two, respectively. Notably, our bounds are applicable to general qLDPC codes, as they rely only on check-weight constraints without assuming geometric locality or special graph connectivity. In the finite-size regime, we derive numerical upper bounds using linear programming techniques and identify explicit code constructions that approach these limits, delineating the landscape of practically relevant qLDPC codes with tens or hundreds of physical qubits.
We give a general procedure for weight reducing quantum codes. This corrects a previous work\cite{owr}, and introduces a new technique that we call "coning" to effectively induce high weight stabilizers in an LDPC code. As one application, any LDPC code (with arbitrary O(1)O(1)O(1) stabilizer weights) may be turned into a code where all stabilizers have weight at most 555 at the cost of at most a constant factor increase in number of physical qubits and constant factor reduction in distance. Also, by applying this technique to a quantum code whose XXX-stabilizers are derived from a classical log-weight random code and whose ZZZ-stabilizers have linear weight, we construct an LDPC quantum code with distance Ω~(N2/3)\tilde Ω(N^{2/3})Ω~(N2/3) and Ω~(N2/3)\tildeΩ(N^{2/3})Ω~(N2/3) logical qubits.
Stabilizer codes are often constructed within the Calderbank--Shor--Steane (CSS) framework, where two mutually orthogonal binary classical codes define XXX and ZZZ-type stabilizer generators. While this structure is algebraically convenient, additional non-CSS constraints may help suppress low-weight logical operators and improve decoding performance in the finite-length regime. We thus introduce quantum XYZ stabilizer codes, whose parity-check matrix (PCM) is built from three pairwise orthogonal binary PCMs associated with XXX-, YYY-, and ZZZ-type stabilizer generators. A nontrivial point is that an XYZ code instance is not automatically genuinely non-CSS: the same stabilizer group may admit a CSS generating set. We characterize this collapse, obtaining algebraic and rank conditions for deciding when the YYY-type checks are redundant and when they define genuinely non-CSS stabilizer constraints. We also derive upper and lower bounds on the quantum minimum distance, including bounds for mixed Pauli logical operators. The novel framework includes a known non-CSS topological code, namely the XYZ2^22 hexagonal code, and yields also sparse finite-length quantum low-density parity-check (qLDPC) constructions from intersecting-subset and quasi-dyadic code families. Simulations under depolarizing code-capacity noise and quaternary belief propagation decoding show that the proposed XYZ qLDPC instances can outperform representative CSS qLDPC instances with similar finite-length parameters.
Quantum weight reduction is the task of transforming a quantum code with large check weight into one with small check weight. This problem is important in practice, since low-weight measurements are necessary for reliable implementations of quantum error correction on physical hardware. It is also important theoretically, as it can be used to construct constant-locality versions of quantum locally testable codes, which may be relevant to the quantum PCP conjecture. We give a streamlined geometric procedure for quantum weight reduction based entirely on coning and treating X and Z checks symmetrically, which simplifies Hastings' previous approach. In particular, given an arbitrary [[n,k,d]][[n,k,d]][[n,k,d]] quantum code with weight www, our method produces a code with parameters [[O(nw2log⁡w),k,Ω(dw)]][[O(n w^2 \log w), k, Ω(d w)]][[O(nw2logw),k,Ω(dw)]], check weight 555, and qubit weight 666; these bounds are optimal or close to optimal within the current geometric framework. Applied to random dense CSS codes, our procedure yields explicit quantum codes surpassing the square-root distance barrier, with parameters [[n,Ω~(n1/3),Ω~(n2/3)]][[n, \tilde Ω(n^{1/3}), \tilde Ω(n^{2/3})]][[n,Ω~(n1/3),Ω~(n2/3)]]. These codes also admit a three-dimensional embedding that saturates the Bravyi-Poulin-Terhal (BPT) bound, recovering the layer-code result. Our weight reduction technique also improves fault-tolerant logical-operator measurements by reducing the required number of ancilla qubits.
We generalize the unified framework in [Phys. Rev. A 113, 022438 (2026)] to accommodate arbitrary stabilizer codes (referred as non-CSS for emphasis). The generalization has immediate consequences in areas including logical measurement, quantum weight reduction and Euclidean embedding. For example, currently CSS (pure X,ZX,ZX,Z-type) logical measurements are well-understood based on the (height-1) cone, while non-CSS (e.g., YYY-type) logical measurements are ad hoc (e.g., rely on local Clifford transform). Similarly, quantum weight reduction and optimal Euclidean embeddings only exist for CSS input codes. Here, we show that our generalized framework addresses this issue, and thus many constructions, including qLDPC surgery, Layer Codes and quantum weight reduction generalize to non-CSS codes in a relatively straightforward fashion. The previously mentioned examples are derived in detail for clarity.
Stabilizer codes are the most widely studied class of quantum error-correcting codes and form the basis of most proposals for a fault-tolerant quantum computer. A stabilizer code is defined by a set of parity-check operators, which are measured in order to infer information about errors that may have occurred. In typical settings, measuring these operators is itself a noisy process and the noise strength scales with the number of qubits involved in a given parity check, or its weight. Hastings has proposed a method for reducing the weights of the parity checks of a stabilizer code, though it has previously only been studied in the asymptotic regime. Here, we instead focus on the regime of small to medium-size codes suitable for quantum computing hardware. We both provide a fully explicit description of Hastings’s method and propose a substantially simplified weight-reduction method that is applicable to the class of quantum product codes. Our simplified method allows us to reduce the check weights of hypergraph- and lifted-product codes to at most six, while preserving the number of logical qubits and at least retaining (in fact, often increasing) the code distance. The price we pay is an increase in the number of physical qubits by a constant factor but we find that our method is much more efficient than Hastings’s method in this regard. We benchmark the performance of our codes on a simulated photonic quantum computing architecture based on Gottesman-Kitaev-Preskill qubits and passive linear optics, finding that our weight-reduction method substantially improves code performance. Published by the American Physical Society 2024